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ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS > Written Word > All Asian
TSAR Publications | This organization is dedicated to
bringing to the reading public fresh new writing from Canada and
across the world that reflects the diversity of our rapidly globalizing
world, particularly in Canada and the United States. Our focus
is on works that can loosely be termed 'multicultural' and particularly
those that pertain to Asia and Africa.
In 1981, a group of young people
who had been in North America for just over a decade, decided
to take the plunge and start the magazine they had always dreamed
about as students. It was at a time when Naipaul had to be ordered
from bookstores, let alone Narayan or Ngugi or Soyinka. The result
was The Toronto South Asian Review, which later became the much
broader-based The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad
and helped entrench a generation of new writers. As an offshoot
of this literary magazine, TSAR Publications published its first
title in 1985, a book of essays on South Asian Canadian literature,
followed by a book of poetry by Sri Lankan Canadian Rienzi Crusz.
Among our achievements: we have
played a role in the formulation of the Indo-Caribbean identity
through the publication of several ground-breaking titles; we
have kept in print books by major Caribbean writers Sam Selvon,
Ismith Khan, and John Stewart; we have published provocative and
perceptive social and literary critical works by Arnold Itwaru,
Arun Prabha Mukherjee and Himani Bannerji; the introduction of
the important Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera; the first historical
and critical study of Chinese Canadian writing in English; the
first anthologies of South Asian Canadian literature and South
Asian Canadian women's poetry; and South Asian Canadian and
American women's fiction.
www.tsarbooks.com
TSAR Authors
Shyamal Bagchee is an unrepentant romantic. His poetry
has been published in literary journals internationally. He attended
universities in Delhi; Santiniketan (Tagore's "poet's school");
Hamilton, Ontario and Toronto. Shyamal Bagchee lives and writes
in St. Albert, Alberta. He loves driving very long distances on
that province's uncrowded highways and byways. He is a keen and
serious photographer.
Works: Gabardine & Other
Poems (Poetry)
Natasha Bakht is an assistant professor of law at
the University of Ottawa. She was called to the bar of Ontario
in 2003 and served as a law clerk to Justice Louis Arbour at the
Supreme Court of Canada. Her research interests are generally
in the area of law, culture and minority rights and specifically
in the intersecting area of religious freedom and women's equality.
Natasha has written extensively on the issue of religious arbitration
in family law. Her pro bono work includes being active as a member
of the Law Program Committee for the Women's Legal Education and
Action Fund (LEAF). Natasha is also an Indian contemporary dancer
and choreographer <INSERT LINK>. She is the 2008 co-recipient
of the KM Hunter Artists Award, presented to artists in Ontario
who have begun to produce a body of work and make a significant
mark in their field.
Works: Belonging and Banishment:
Being Muslim in Canada (Essays)
Salima Bhimani was born in the United Kingdom and
raised in Canada. She has a master's degree in Islam and Globalization,
and identifies herself as a South Asian Muslim woman who is also
Canadian. She is passionate about spirituality and art, and is
active in community development in Toronto.
Works: Majalis al-Ilm: sessions
of knowledge (Social Commentary)
Rana Bose's first novel, Recovering Rude was
published by Vehicule Press in 2000 to critical acclaim. He has
also been a well-known playwright in Canada and has had ten of
his plays published by Seagull, Prestige and The Canadian Theatre
Review. All of these plays have been performed in Canada, the
United States, India and perhaps elsewhere. He has been an engineer,
mentor, consultant, performance poet, playwright, and resides
in Montréal and sometimes in Kolkata. He is also one of
the editors of the webzine Montreal Serai.
Works: The Fourth Canvas (Fiction)
Lien Chao came from China to Canada in 1984.
Her first book, Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in
English, was published in 1997 and won the Gabrielle Roy Award
for Canadian Criticism. Her work includes two volumes of bilingual
poetry (Maples and the Stream and More Than Skin Deep), and a
creative memoir (Tiger Girl (Hu Nu)), and she is the co-editor,
with Jim Wong-Chu, of Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary
Chinese Canadian Fiction. She lives in Toronto.
Works: Beyond Silence (Criticism, History); The Chinese Knot and
Other Stories (Fiction); Maples and the Stream (Poetry); More
Than Skin Deep (Poetry); Strike the Wok (Fiction); Tiger Girl
(Hu Nu) (Creative Memoir)
Madeline Coopsammy was born in Trinidad. She studied at
Delhi University, India and came to Canada in 1968, settling in
Winnipeg where she attended the University of Manitoba to become
a certified teacher. Her poetry and short stories have been published
in anthologies and journals in Canada and the United States.
Works: Prairie Journey (Poetry)
Rienzi Crusz was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada
in 1965. Educated at the Universities of Ceylon, London (England),
Toronto and Waterloo, he is at present Reference and Collections
Librarian at the University of Waterloo. He is widely published
in magazines in Canada and the US, and the author of 10 collections
of poetry.
Works: Gambolling with the Divine
(Poetry); Insurgent Rain (Poetry)
Cyril Dabydeen has written poetry, short stories,
and novels, and has edited A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary
Landscape and Another Way to Dance: Contemporary Asian Poetry
in Canada and the U.S. His poetry and fiction have appeared in
Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Caribbean,
and been anthologized in many places including Best Canadian Short
Stories, Caribbean New Wave: Contemporary Short Stories and the
Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. He has been recommended for a
Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award.
Works: Another Way to Dance (Poetry); Drums of My Flesh (Fiction);
Hemisphere of Love (Poetry); My Brahmin Days and Other Stories
(Fiction)
Rocio Davis was born in Manila, Philippines and
has degrees from the Ateneode Manila University (Philippines)
and the University of Navarre (Spain). She is currently Associate
Professor of American and Postcolonial Literature at the University
of Navarre. Her main research interests are the fiction of the
Asian diaspora, postcolonial literature, narratology and children's
literature.
Works: Transcultural Reinventions
(Criticism)
Nitin Deckha was born in London, England, and raised
in Toronto. His stories have appeared in Existere, Anokhi, and
at www.sulekha.com and in collected works. Deckha holds a PhD
in Anthropology from Rice University, Houston and teaches social
sciences in Toronto. His journalism occasionally appears in Desi
Life, a Toronto Star magazine.
Works: Shopping for Sabzi (Fiction)
Raywat Deonandan's short stories have appeared in several
countries, including Canada, the United States, England and China.
He has won two Hart House Literary Prizes and First Prize in the
1995 Canadian Author's Association National Student Short Story
Contest. His book, Sweet Like Saltwater, won the Guyana Prize
for Best First Work. His interests include karate (in which he
has a black belt), biotechnology, space exploration, and ancient
history. Of Indian ancestry, Guyanese origin and Canadian citizenship,
Deonandan makes his home in both Toronto and Washington D.C.
Works: Divine Elemental (Fiction);
Sweet Like Saltwater (Fiction)
Born and raised in Beijing,
China, Bing He moved to Canada in 1992. She has published
widely in major journals and newspapers in China and is the special
correspondent for Globe Weekly in Canada. Her poetry in English
has appeared in several journals and anthologies.
Works: Alphabet Zen (Poetry)
Chelva Kanaganayakam is a professor of English at the University
of Toronto and a scholar of postcolonial literature.
Works: Configurations of Exile
(Interviews); Dark Antonyms and Paradise (Criticism); History
and Imagination (Essays); Lutesong and Lament (Fiction); Moveable
Margins (Criticism)
Kwai-Yun Li's Hakka parents emigrated from Moi-yen,
China to Calcutta, India, where Kwai was born. She grew up in
Chattawalla Gully, in the old part of the city, and came to Canada
through an arranged marriage. She is a co-author of A Kiss Beside
the Monkey Bars, a collection of short stories.
Works: The Palm Leaf Fan and
Other Stories (Fiction)
Anand Mahadevan was born and raised in India. He came
to Canada in 1996 and has been educated in the United States,
Germany and Canada. He lives, writes and teaches in Toronto.
Works: The Strike (Fiction)
Tariq Malik was born and raised in Pakistan. He
lived for 20 years in Kuwait, working as an industrial chemist,
before emigrating to Canada in 1995. He has continued to work
in his chosen field, having taken to heart writer Annie Dillard's
advice: "Experienced writers urge young men and women to
learn a useful trade."
Works: Rainsongs of Kotli (Fiction)
Arun Prabha Mukherjee came to Canada from India in 1971 as
a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Toronto. An Associate
Professor of English at York University in Toronto, she is the
author of The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel: The Rhetoric
of Dreiser and His Contemporaries (1987), Towards an Aesthetic
of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism and Cultural Imperialism
(1988) and numerous books and articles on postcolonial literatures,
women's writing and critical theory. She has edited an anthology
of writings by women of colour and aboriginal women entitled,
Sharing Our Experience (1993), and contributed entries on several
South Asian women writers to A Feminist Companion to Literature
in English (1990).
Works: Oppositional Aesthetics
(Criticism); Postcolonialism: My Living (Criticism)
Of Kashmiri origin, Sophia
Mustafa was born in India in 1922 and grew up and went to
school in Nairobi, Kenya. She was married in 1940 and moved to
Tanganyika in 1948 with her husband. She was one of the first
women members of parliament in Tanzania when she wrote The Tanganyika
Way, published by Oxford University Press in 1961. She moved to
Canada with her husband in 1989. She has three grown-up children.
Works: In the Shadow of Kirinyaga
(Fiction)
Rita Nayar has a university degree in psychology
and a teaching certificate from the University of Sheffield, England.
A senior corporate professional in Toronto, she is also an artist
and a poet. She has written her memoir, Ordeal by Fire, for the
thousands of men and women who, through a twist of fate, have
found themselves in tragic and unforgiving circumstances, and
are desperate to free themselves from a hopeless and dead future.
Works: Ordeal by Fire: A Memoir
(Memoir)
Sasenarine Persaud is the author of eight books. He received
the 1996 KM Hunter Foundation Emerging Artist Award for his fiction
and the 1999 Arthur Schomburg Award for his pioneering of Yogic
Realism and his "outstanding achievements as an author, poet
and literary theorist." Persaud's fiction, essays and poetry
have been published in Canada, England, India, the Middle East,
the United States and the West Indies.
Works: Canada Geese and Apple
Chatney (Fiction); In a Boston Night (Poetry)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is an American-raised, Toronto-based
queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken word artist and teacher. Her writing
has been published in the anthologies Colonize This!, Dangerous
Families, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, the Lambda Award-nominated
Brazen Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A
Girl's Guide To Taking Over the World. A frequent contributor
to Colorlines and Bitch magazines, she has performed her work
throughout the United States and Canada.
Works: Consensual Genocide (Poetry)
Sanjay Talreja is a filmmaker who has been working
in the visual medium - primarily documentaries - for a number
of years in India, Canada and the United States. He is also Assistant
Professor teaching documentary and media-related classes at the
University of Windsor.
Works: Strangers in the Mirror
(Social and Cultural Criticism)
Salimah Valiani is a researcher in political economy
and world economic development, an activist and a writer. She
has lived and worked in cities in Canada, England, the United
States, and South Africa. Her creative writing has appeared in
alternative newspapers and literary journals, and has been used
in community radio programs. breathing for breadth, her first
collection of poetry, is replete with social, political and cultural
commentary. Struggles of day-to-day life, the beauty of world
cities, and protest and resistance are some of the themes featured
in her poems.
Works: breathing for breadth
(Poetry)
Nalini Warriar won the McAuslan First Book Award in
2002 for her collection of short stories Blues from the Malabar
Coast. She has conducted writing workshops and writes reviews
for the Montréal Gazette. She wrote the Quebec City chapter
in Write Across Canada. Nalini was born in Kerala, India, and
has lived in Heidelberg, Germany, and Strasbourg, France. She
is a cancer researcher and a biotech consultant fluent in German
and French. She lives in Quebec City.
Works: Blues From The Malabar
Coast (Fiction); The Enemy Within (Fiction)
Betty Warrington-Kearsley was born in England but grew up with
her Chinese family in a kampong in Singapore. She also writes
Haiku and short stories, and is working on a memoir. She won first
prize in ARC's 2004 Diana Brebner Poetry Award, was co-winner
in the 2004 Ray Burrell poetry contest, and was short-listed for
the 2004 Shaunt Basmajian Poetry Award. She has published in several
magazines and anthologies, including Tracking Ground and Yawp
(2005, University of Ottawa), The Delicate Art of Paper Passing
(2006, Carleton University), and the 58th Basho International
Festival Anthology (Japan) in 2004. Betty also writes under her
pen name, Pe-Lien.
Works: Red Lacquered Chopsticks
(Poetry)
Jim Wong-Chu is co-editor of the critically acclaimed
anthologies, Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Chinese Canadian
Writing, and Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese Canadian
Poetry. He is a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers'
Workshop.
Works: Strike the Wok (Fiction)
Lists of Books Published (PDF
Document / 20 KB download)
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